


Daughter of the Void

by CourierNinetyTwo



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-09
Updated: 2012-12-09
Packaged: 2017-11-20 16:42:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,654
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/587529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CourierNinetyTwo/pseuds/CourierNinetyTwo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's a name missing from the Normandy's memorial wall.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Daughter of the Void

Cold stiffened the scars on his hands. It cut to the bone. Maybe it could be blamed on the Normandy's ventilation or the fact that a crowd didn't gather here anymore, but the space in front of the monument was always frigid. Standing there waiting for his back to seize up wasn't helping anything, but he still couldn't decide where to put the plaque.

Plaques, plural. He'd had two made, one for each name.

The decision should have been simple. Which mattered more, the name someone was born with or the one they made? They would put Lieutenant Commander first on his grave, before any name. When something finally killed him, anyway. Death kept a loose grip on his body; every so often its fingers flexed, reminding him how close he'd come.

Maybe if Miranda had survived, she could have put him back right again. The medics who extracted him from London had assumed he was dead until biotic sparks had flickered at his fingertips, trying to summon a barrier out of reflex. His bones were set, more organs were replaced, but even in a coma his body had rejected graft and graft until Liara had recovered some of the Lazarus Project's old notes. The next set held together, just barely.

And for what? He shouldn't have been needed anymore. No quarter had been given and the Reapers were dead. He had never made plans for the aftermath.

\---

"Where are you from, Shepard?" Morinth's voice had that amused lilt, as if she had already guessed the answer and was waiting for the galaxy to catch up.

"Lanzhou. It's in China, on Earth." His head shifted back against the pillow, hands folded on his chest. If she was going to try and kill him, she'd have to move from the foot of the bed. He might as well pretend to to be comfortable. "What about you?"

That was the game. Tit for tat. Someone who would talk to him as a man instead of a commander, at the risk of knowing he was giving her all she needed to get inside his head.

"Serrice. I haven't been back in centuries, though. Thessia examines claims of being a justicar a little more intently than the rest of the galaxy." Morinth said. "Are your parents back there? Are they proud of their heroic son?"

He knew their names. The Alliance had done a full genetic workup in Hong Kong before letting him join the service and records had come back. Ma Xiao and Ma Xiangwei - with one son, three months old - killed in an explosion after the Eldfell-Ashland factory they worked in suffered a sudden breach. Experimental materials had been seeping into the walls for months before the reactor finally went critical. 

He'd left the foster homes and been with the gang for five years before he finally heard the word 'eezo'. By then, he wasn't Ma Jun. He was Mason, Mason Shepard. A name that blended in, even without a translator. One the recruiter didn't blink at when he said he was from Lanzhou. After all, the capital was known for a group of 'native environmental extremists'. He couldn't imagine why.

"You're the last person I thought would bring up parents." He said.

"Because you helped kill my mother?" Morinth laughed softly. "That shouldn't change your answer."

"She was going to kill me once we defeated the Collectors. That wasn't an option."

"I know how eager you were to escape the executioner's axe, Shepard." Morinth extended her hand, palm up. "I'm not judging."

His fingers entwined with hers and squeezed. Beneath the blue skin and slender structure, he knew there was centuries of power, an infinite hunger waiting to be unleashed. It was why he'd let Samara die. He didn't need an executioner, he needed someone to remind him what kind of monster he could become if he let his mind fall off the mission.

People like him were needed in a war, as long as they recognized they were expendable after. But he knew in his gut that the war wouldn't end with the Collectors. It had been too soon.

\---

"I miss my sisters." Morinth said, tilting her head back into the full spray of the shower. "I think I'm going to visit them."

He sat at his desk, fingers tracing the gouges in his old helmet. She stepped into his personal space whenever she wanted, waiting for him to challenge it. If he got angry, if he lost control, Morinth would have him. Surviving the Omega-4 Relay hadn't changed that.

"You should." He said. "They're at a monastery, right?"

"Yes." The sound of the water faded away. He heard her pull a towel from the rack. "I just sent them an email letting them know our mother died a hero fighting the Collectors."

His fingers went still against the corroded titanium. "You're not taking credit for that?"

"They wouldn't believe I changed that much."

Morinth stepped out of the bathroom in Samara's black armor, carefully positioning the golden jewelry on her brow. Her heels clicked softly against the floor as she came into full view, scrubbed clean of blood and dirt.

His hair was still wet, dark strands sticking up on the back of his neck. Morinth's fingers brushed over the smooth line of his jaw, freshly shaved. It took everything in him not to lean into the touch. If he bended, he would break. It had been too long since Ashley, since Virmire. Alenko still wasn't speaking to him. That was probably for the best.

"If you're going to go, you should." He said. "I got a call from Admiral Hackett. It's a solo mission, but the Alliance is looking my way again."

"You're warning me? That's sweet." Morinth slowly withdrew her hand. "I'll go when the time's right."

He shrugged. It didn't matter if she left or not. This mission would be the last, then he'd tell Hackett to find someone else to lead the front. A dead man could only be asked to walk so far.

\---

She was gone when he came back from the Bahak system, the gap in space where the Alpha Relay had once been. Three hundred thousand dead and he would have walked into Morinth's arms and gone to sleep. Real sleep, not like the emptiness of Alchera, the fever dreams under laser scalpels. Sometimes his heart skipped a step when he was running across a battlefield; he had never gotten the chance to ask Miranda how many times it had stopped.

Hackett brought him back to Earth, the homeworld he was supposed to defend. After Akuze, after Saren, after Harbinger, they had brought him back. The Reapers moved closer with every passing day he spent in that cell, playing cards with Vega and doing pushups. James wanted the war stories he wouldn't tell. He talked about the streets of Lanzhou instead, about hijacking skycars to Hong Kong and celebrating Spring Festival in Shanghai. It was better than remembering he was grounded in Toronto, home and yet not.

Even when Earth was burning, when the turians and krogan and quarians expected him to come to center and fix sixteen centuries of mistakes in the middle of a war, he listened. Liara didn't ask why he wanted the files and newsfeeds, she just sent them to his terminal. She always had his back, even if he wasn't sure why.

She should have hated him after Lesuss, after he grabbed Falere and demanded to know where Morinth - Mirala - was. Falere had burst into tears, pleading for him to save Rila, that she would tell him everything she knew. As it turned out, that was little to nothing. She mentioned a rumor from the matriarch of the monastery, that someone had unsuccessfully tried to breach the security weeks before. He left her there, to find solace in the ruins.

There was nothing. Not on Thessia, not on the Illusive Man's base. He even asked Aria if that Ardat-Yakshi had stopped by Purgatory. Death came easily without Morinth laughing in his ear as a reminder. The losses were tallied, deemed acceptable. He didn't even have to make excuses, the Alliance and the Council just nodded their heads.

In London, at the end, he knew. More than a dozen banshees had died beneath his fists and the barrel of a shotgun, the charge sending him across the field in a nova of blue light.

She was the same as the rest of them; blue skin stretched out to a hollow grey, stomach distended. Eezo nodules glowed beneath the flesh, bones warped into claws, tubes filtered through every vital system. He wouldn't have even hesitated if he hadn't felt that familiar chill down his spine. The lead weight of her mind, settling onto his shoulders, urging him to drop to his knees, to give in.

"I'm sorry." His helmet mike was on; he knew Liara and James had heard him. It didn't matter.

He pulled the trigger until the shotgun clicked empty.

\---

There was a flicker of regret. He should have killed Falere too, rather than have her live with the knowledge that she was the last.

The steel corners of each plaque bit into his palm as he shuffled between them - Morinth, Mirala, Morinth. If Liara was choosing his, which name would he have wanted there?

It fit perfectly beneath Samara's name. The soft click was a comfort, acknowledging the permanence, an end to things. He read through the list, counting the numbers in his head that weren't engraved into a wall. Heroes and victims both, casualties of a war he had won.

After all this, she would understand. His pistol was waiting on the desk in his quarters with the safety off, next to a glass of Serrice Ice.

One pull of the trigger and they would sleep in the dark together. No one else would have to suffer for it.


End file.
